Fairweather's Forecast

A WALK IN THE RUINS: HOLT

North up Crescent Ridge Road from Alberta City is the hard as nails steel mill town of Holt, Alabama, where somewhere under its ridges and in these square miles of debris me and my Northport blood brothers from Tuscaloosa County High bought underage beer and feasted on the hometown blues of Johnny Shines, now home to blues even Shines couldn’t play.  We park on cleared gravel beside a relief tent handing out water and clothing and walk south across Crescent Ridge Road to a ridge overlooking the tornado’s path through Tuscaloosa and Alberta City. 

 

On top of this ridge and about a hundred feet in front of the slope a line of mailboxes awaits deliveries that never will come, and behind them a cleared space opens to a highway of sharpened trees mapping the destructive route.  At the bottom of the slope snapped logs are scattered about like in the old children’s game of pick-up sticks, and about a mile north off Holt-Peterson Road we’ll later see where cars are impaled on tree-stakes sticking out from cliffs.  We walk east along the ridge and into the ruins where we find two men picking through the remains of a home.  “We don’t have insurance.  And FEMA says we’ve got to find some paperwork.”  The owner waves an arm across the remains under his feet—“How?”  About a football field further east from this uninsured house Hunter stops to shoot a school textbook, Physical Science, displayed on the ground, a vain attempt at an explanation. 

 

Back across Crescent Ridge Road to the north is an eclectic mixture of house and trailer ruins, some metal pieces along with mattresses, box springs and clothing wrapped around severed trees and their few jutting limbs.  Buried in a stack of concrete blocks and rusty sheet metal, a black car top peeks out at us, the telltale rescue markings smeared on a window’s surviving triangular space.  I can’t read if anyone died here.

 

The only standing structure we come to is a small yellow house with window frames containing unbroken glass removed and leaning against a small wooden front porch only missing the front steps.  We sidestep down a dirt and debris embankment and I ask Shirley Billingsly if I can take a picture of her house.  “I prayed to God and he protected us,” she says, pointing to a tree that clipped only the east side of her house.  “I knew it was coming because it was prophesized.” Then she hands me a dateless newspaper page crinkled and yellow as parchment.  Bryant Ready for Georgia Tech, pronounces the headline, referring to the early years Bear Bryant coached the Alabama Crimson Tide football team, probably the late ‘50s.  Perhaps it’s a keepsake from a scrapbook miles away,

 

Then two young women step down the embankment and the striking blond with deep blue eyes and a centerfold figure greets Shirley and asks Hunter and me our business.  She and her partner wear blue and white tags identifying them as relief workers.  After I introduce myself and Hunter, the blond tells me she spent some time in Tampa and was married to the wrestling star Steve Austin.  “I’m Debbie Austin,” she says.  “When I wrestled I was known as Queen Debra.  But I’m home now, where I belong.  I grew up in a trailer over there by Mrs. Shirley.” She points to a slab about thirty feet east.  Hunter, smitten with this former WWF Women’s champion, whispers to me that he has Queen Debra’s action figure.  Debbie Austin’s raven-haired friend and sister relief worker, Emily Rudder, takes me aside while Debbie talks with Hunter and Shirley and tells me that Debbie considers Shirley “family,” and encourages me to write this article in the hope it will help with relief and rebuilding efforts.

 

In Shirley’s side yard between her house and the trailer slab and in front of the logs from the tumbled tree that damaged Shirley’s house, I spot a two-foot-high lily nearing bloom, its leaves deep green.  I shoot Shirley’s picture posing beside it.  “That’s my Hope Lily,” she says.  “God will take care of all of us.”                     

A WALK IN THE RUINS: ALBERTA CITY

 

Hunter Barnett, Mariah’s boyfriend, rode out the tornado comforting her at his apartment on Rice Mine Road located about five miles north from the Midtown complex and across the Black Warrior River in the undamaged  Northport area.  Immediately afterward, Hunter navigated the reverse direction we’re taking today, looping the impassable McFarland Boulevard and getting Mariah to her apartment and to their friends in need by driving his Nissan pickup through Holt and Alberta City, areas closed shortly after Hunter and Mariah got through.  They made it but had to park and struggle through hills of wreckage blocking the streets and avoid flaming natural gas lines.  The trip took half an hour and more than one detour, and they didn’t recognize the area when they arrived at 15^th and McFarland.   

 

“I lived over here past the Highlands in Beverly Heights,” Hunter says, pointing to a glut of ruins just south of the University Boulevard overpass spanning Kicker Road.  We try to ride through the Highlands to our south but the flashing yellow barricades dissuade us.  These stylish, custom homes dating to the 1930s, several around 6,000 square feet, catered to professionals, including university professors.  From a distance I see most have a roof and a wall or two missing and the interiors exposed, the furniture gone.  I know someone who knows someone killed in the Highlands, a mantra repeated by many in Tuscaloosa about the most affected neighborhoods.  Hunter’s former rental that he calls “the Crack House,” because of its mold and insect infestations, remains mostly together.  But the tornado razed the first house to the west and the crews searching for the two people who perished there cleared the rubble.  Nothing’s left but a hole surrounded by dirt, an open grave.

 

Because of the 92-degree afternoon heat, we park under the overpass behind a pick-up truck half loaded with debris. Beside it two aged black men sit sprawled in white plastic chairs and wave away clouds of flies, flies from the torn junk food and tortilla packages a few feet away in a scatter of twisted metal.  Some of these packages, still wrapped, remain stacked in topless cases.  Hunter tells me this scrap pile served as a warehouse for some church’s mission work.  From here I survey the expansive ruins south toward 10^th Street East and east beyond 22^nd Avenue East.  During high school I also dated girls over there somewhere in a less affluent area than Forest Lake.  Unlike the Ground Zero ruins, the wooden skeletons of these residences or their slab foundations are distinguishable with drywall-speckled green grass yards spread among them.  Perhaps the tornado vacuumed these houses and dumped many of them somewhere else, the lack of tree damage and denuded trunks in this neighborhood testifying to the power of the wind alone.

 

We climb a bare slope back to University Boulevard, cross to the north side and walk past rubble until we arrive at the standing but eviscerated Alberta Baptist Church, a 90-year-old brick house of worship where the shattered stained glass windows, torn roof and punctured brick walls couldn’t shield the sanctuary.  “In the midst of all the suffering and destruction…God has not abandoned us,” said Pastor Larry Corder to an interviewer shortly after the tornado.  Engineers are assessing the damage to determine if this landmark church can be repaired.

 

A few feet east of the church we survey the damage from 22^nd Street northeast toward Holt.  A mountain of detritus topped by yet another unbroken bookshelf with the undisturbed books neatly organized, punctuates the tornado’s irony in this mostly residential area.  I attempt a climb to see what titles survived, but the loose boards and sharp metal frustrate my efforts.  Beyond this mountain’s foot, a white, crushed SUV marks a flattened, amalgamated terrine of bits and pieces, which defy any attempt to identify what might have stood.   The few snapped, bare trees lean in opposing directions as if to dare us to stare in shock and awe and to contemplate if a pulverized Alberta City can ever be rebuilt.  Back on University Boulevard, Hunter explores a couple of drink coolers sitting on a slab surrounded by Chinese food containers and slick new tires from the OK Tire store a block away.  “I think I used to work here as a delivery boy,” he says.  “But it wasn’t a Chinese restaurant.”  He picks up an unused container.  “This comes from somewhere else.”

 

We cross back south on University Boulevard and come upon an apartment complex with the 2^nd story gone and the 1^st story destroyed, it’s plywood construction ripped like confetti, and cars, trucks and SUVs jammed together in an orgy of metal in what used to be the front parking lot.  Behind the complex is a stairway leading to the sky. Dodging twists of cable and sheet metal, we pick our way back toward the truck until we stumble upon a muddied but undamaged newsstand with an April 27 morning edition of The Tuscaloosa News encased behind the plastic window, no storm warnings visible.  Back at the truck, we talk with one of the relief workers, who observing our cameras pulls out his own pictures for show: a picture of his mutt dog peeing and one of his grandchildren at play.  Across Kicker Road on one of the overpass pilings the graffiti reads, Life Is Too Short.

 

A WALK IN THE RUINS: GROUND ZERO

 My daughter, Mariah Fairweather, uninjured and packing to go home to Tampa for the summer, stands in front of her undamaged 5^th Avenue East Midtown Apartment about 100 feet from the heart of Tuscaloosa, Alabama’s Ground Zero.  With my ancient 35 mm. Pentax camera, I’m walking north along the path of the mile-wide wedge tornado that ripped the ribs of this town where I was born and bred clean for miles and miles.  “Roll Tide,” says a fellow father loading his own daughter’s belongings in a Ford 150 beside Mariah’s Cherokee Jeep, rallying to both the Alabama logo on my T-shirt and the spirit of determination that will rebuild the devastation I’m soon to witness.

 

Walking north, I pass, 19^th Street East, a crumpled vein running west of McFarland Boulevard and south of 15^th Street.  The roofs on most of the first story houses are gone along with some rooms on the houses at the western end of the street.  Piles of rubbish and rubble are shoved to the front of the houses and bits and pieces trail off towards a dusty, flat horizon of destruction saturated by the buzzing of chainsaws.  But new power poles and lines, the labor of 10,000 power company volunteers from all over the South and beyond, point like fingers through the dust toward a clear and silent sky.

 

I walk down the next street running west, 18^th Street East, where the scenery mirrors 19^th Street, until I come to the end of the partial structures.  LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT, warns a paint-scrawled sign leaning against a half-tree, stripped bare and broken off in the middle.  Working in front of a roofless house, I find Wilford Calhoun, a retired high school social studies teacher who once taught his students in a log cabin he built with them for a lesson.  Chainsaw in hand, his arms solid as oak limbs and roped with muscle, he’s helping out a friend.  Wilford graduated from Tuscaloosa County High in ’67, three years before me.  “An hour after the tornado all you heard was these things.”  He holds up the chainsaw, pull-starts it and goes to work on the lower limbs of an oak tree toppled in the front yard, probably the same oak that smashed the roof.  I image those first hours must’ve screamed like a million cicadas.  Below the roof on a remaining wall a biblical declaration warns, A MIGHTY FORTRESS IS OUR GOD, lending authority to the LOOTERS sign.

 

The street behind Mariah’s apartment, 17^th Street East, curves north to 6^th Avenue East and  past the entrance to the mostly intact Midtown Plaza, where it exits to a wasteland, McFarland Boulevard and 15^th Street.  More than a mile across heaps of splintered wood, twisted metal, knotted cables and wires, crushed cars, and a dirty haze that grits my nostrils, stands Druid City Hospital, slightly damaged but functional during and after the tornado.  My friend of 53 years, Frank Pruitt, weathered the tornado there after suffering a mild heart attack earlier.  He watched the tornado’s cataclysm from his window and witnessed wounded by the dozens cramming the halls in its aftermath.  Some wounded rode flatbed trucks in for treatment; others caught rides with friends or Samaritans, strangers who searched the rubble for survivors; and still others from nearby Alberta City walked as a tattered horde across an overpass to the hospital.

 

I cross 15^th Street to the edge of the Cedar Crest area and notice the omnipresence of concrete blocks in this mishmash of materials, the scatter of thousands of foundations:  businesses, offices, apartments and houses of brick and wood.  An occasional house retains a wall or two or three, but its innards are blown out or sucked out and lie somewhere else, perhaps as far away as Birmingham, 60 miles away.   One of Mariah’s friends, Stuart Mitchell, survived in one of the decimated structures, 212 Cedar Crest, by taking cover in a closet with a couch pulled in front of it.  Somewhere near his former address, somewhere because I can’t pinpoint it in this hodgepodge of rubble, an upside down car smashed nearly flat lies with its wheels turned slightly to the left and its rear end propped with a 2x4, propped to check for survivors or bodies.  On its door the 0 orange marking at he bottom of an X indicates nobody died inside.  Another partial structure has Missing Dog spray-painted in black on a sheet of plywood nailed across a window, but Found is sprayed across it in red. 

 

I maneuver out of this maze and continue down 15^th Street about a hundred feet until I spot a man in an official looking red polo stepping gingerly on a bridge of 2x6s over the ruins of a house cleaved in half.  On a remaining inside wall exposed to the street stand three shelves of books, still arranged in order and ready to read.  I asked the worker if I can take a picture of the books and he shrugs.  “I’m looking for cable,” he says.  Then he points to a 4x6 open space under the bookshelf.  “That was their safe place.”  He shakes his head.  “They’re okay.”

 

I change film at an intact but closed Wendy’s and cross back south over 15^th Street at Lake Avenue to the Forest Lake neighborhood, where a girl I once dated in college once lived.  Delivered by the tornado to this neighborhood’s namesake lake from a quarter mile away is a pod requesting, Rent Me.  Behind the pod where one story and two story homes once sat flotsam envelops the shoreline, bare trees stick straight up as flagpoles, and on the north shore Old Glory flies from a mostly undamaged office’s flagpole, a landmark signaling the west border of Ground Zero.  Behind me to the west Tuscaloosa lies untouched by the tornado’s path that moved southwest to northeast.  Across the street to the north at the corner of 1^st Avenue and 15^th Street, FEMA disperses services from spotless white tents, a service only partially needed because since the hours following the tornado churches, family, friends and Samaritans, like my daughter Mariah and her Alpha Phi sorority sisters, helped and housed the uninjured survivors; in fact, Red Cross shelters waited less than full a day after the tornado. 

 

Heading up 15^th Street on the south side, I turn south on Forest Lake Drive and venture inside this neighborhood’s jagged mouth where trees stripped of leaves, limbs and bark jut at the sky like a forest of giant toothpicks.  One 3-foot-high tree trunk, twisted into a mushroom of splitters by the 200 plus mile-an-hour-winds, squats amidst them.  Out of the toothpick trees about fifty feet east and at the foot of a refuse pile near Denny Street, the stench of rotting meat and organic compost almost causes me to vomit.  I don’t have a mask so I cover my nose and mouth with my hand and breath light.  I see nobody except a masked, orange-vested city worker standing in front of a barricade.  He tells me recovery squads are still searching for bodies close to here.  After three days of helping storm victims, Mariah took sick from the noxious dust cloud and the putrid smell.  I can’t believe she lasted so long.

 

On the 15^th Street stretch back toward Mariah’s apartment, I pass a roofless Shlotchky’s Deli, and then at the 6^th Street turn to Mariah’s I arrive at a windowless Taco Casa, both injured but with their  four-walled bodies still standing on solid foundations.  Coming Back Soon, exclaims the banner in the Taco Casa’s arched window.                                        

Governor Scott’s Reading List

Dear Governor Scott,  I apologize for this tardy list, but I was unaware that the only book you’ve read lately is Sarah Palin’s engaging children’s book, BAMBI FOR BREAKFAST!  Because you’re an outsider totally unfamiliar with Florida, please allow me to suggest the following writers whose books I believe will help you govern us. 

Florida History:  Tim Dorsey.  Serge Storms is Dorsey’s lovable serial killer who travels through our Sunshine State (see license tags) murdering those who sin against our history in a variety of creative ways similiar to Dante ( Italian writer who wrote the INFERNO).  Also you should read Dante in order to impress your worldly corporate business buddies, though I don’t believe you’ll find either Dante or Dorsey on the shelves at Wal-Mart. 

Florida Environment:  Randy Wayne White.  White’s hero Doc Ford is a marine biologist and former very dangerous CIA fellow who can teach you about the importance of our waterland.  Also he’s a weapons expert who could help you learn about the importance of our 2nd Amendment freedoms.  Do keep in mind though that it’s the bad guys who learn these lessons in White’s novels.  You might want to pass him on to your BP friends.

Politics:  Carl Hiaasen.  His novels deal with Big Sugar, tourism, consumer protection, titty bars and many other subjects of particular interest to our politicians.  You may learn how to avoid being caught by seeing how those politicians who trespassed were caught.  You didn’t do so well yourself with that Medicaid business.  You remember that as a CEO you got fired for cheating the government out of hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars, those same kind of dollars for our rail system you sent back to the Feds.  Whew, close call.  You almost went to jail!  That 5th Amendment sure comes in handy, doesn’t it!  But Hiaasen’s villains don’t get off that easy.

Local Color:  Steve Otto, THE TAMPA TRIBUNE.   He knows where to find the best Cuban sandwichs in all of Florida.  No, they’re not made by communists, probably not even socialists.  I suggest you serve Cubans to your global big business clients when they’re in town to pick up the cash from the tax cuts you’re going to serve them.  Please save any scraps for the teachers and public servants whose paychecks and pensions funded those tax slices.

Special BFF Request:  You education guru Mr. Wise is introducing a bill to weaken the teaching of the Theory of Evolution in our schools.  “Why are the apes still here if evolution is true?” he asked.  Please, no books for Mr. Wise, who claims to be a former teacher.  I suggest he watch PLANET OF THE APES.  The apes have evolved, but Mr. Wise and his species haven’t.  They passed you by, Bubba.           

Education and Uncle Sam Forecast

My daddy forecast weather for the Federal Aviation Agency.  At work, he relied on instruments and consultation with his peers, but at home he relied on experience, observation, intuition and common sense, and I never remember my daddy missing a forecast.  In this blog I hope to do the same, except sometimes, like today, I hope I’m wrong!  My first forecast is for Education and Uncle Sam:  I predict hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and tidal waves.  In Florida and many other states the governors and Republican-led legislators are destroying education budgets and pensions in order to give tax breaks to Big BuSINess.  These mostly global cooporations will not add jobs to our USA but will expand in China, Mexico and other near-slave labor countries.  The USA, with or without labor unions, can’t compete with 2 dollar-a-day wages and no benefits.  Therefore, the Republican strategy is to scapegoat educators and unions and control the media in an attempt to create a NAZI state, a one-party state run by government allied with Big BuSINess and propagandized by the media.  And I wouldn’t be surprised to see a contrived tragedy to help speed this horror along.  Please note the JFK assassination.  This forecast is not the raving of a far left loon:  once upon a recent time I claimed to be a Republican.